NRATV’s Colion Noir examines Seattle’s needle exchange program

It’s always interesting seeing an outside perspective on local issues, and that’s just what we have with NRATV’s Colion Noir, who visited Seattle recently to get a sense for the city’s needle exchange program.

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Noir spoke with a handful of people involved with Seattle’s harm reduction efforts, getting their insight, and letting his viewers draw their own conclusions.

“I wanted people to tell their sides of it, and get both perspectives of the idea, and allow the audience to then walk away with their own informed idea of what is going on in Seattle,” he told KTTH’s Jason Rantz. “They can see that for themselves, and have as much information as possible, without me kind of swaying it with my own bias.”

Although he was initially attracted to the idea of the needle exchange program, he soon found himself encountering issues.

“I didn’t really generally have a problem with it — it seemed like a pretty good idea,” said Noir. “It would help prevent the spread of diseases that result from IV drug use.”

But after getting to Seattle to see the needle exchange up close, “something started to irk me a bit,” he added.

“It seemed more like a needle dump more than a needle exchange,” he pointed out. “It doesn’t call for any type of accountability on the part of the users. What it says is ‘here I’ll give you as many needles as you possibly want, and then you can just use them, dispose them at will, and then come and get some more.'”

Noir’s main issue surrounded that idea of accountability, referencing the way that needle exchanges don’t do much to get people off of drugs, so much as they allow people to continue using.

“What I walked away from was a lot of enabling of using drugs, more so than trying to actively get people off of using drugs.”

You can watch Noir’s conversations on harm reduction in Seattle below, and subscribe to his NRATV series on YouTube here.

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